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The problem is, there is no way to block silent video without disabling JS completely. Block the <video> element? Sites will use GIFs. Block GIF animation? Sit
by roca 8y ago
The problem is, there is no way to block silent video without disabling JS completely.
Block the <video> element? Sites will use GIFs. Block GIF animation? Sites will present a slideshow of still images. Alternatively sites can implement video decoding in JS and render to a <canvas>. This isn't just theoretical, these have all been observed in practice. And these are all worse for users in every way than letting sites use <video> with a decent video codec.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThen start from a blacklist-fucking-eveything-approach, and hand off elements to sites (or frameworks, or individual pages) based by what they can and will use responsibly, starting with charactersets and linefeeds. Emphasis, lists, links, colours, headings (pages all in <h4>, yes, I'm looking at you), asides, headers, footers, graphics, audio, video, fonts, sticky elements, scripts, cookies, notifications? Earn that shit. And lose it fast. If this sounds like a paranoid defensive stance from being under persistent attack, it is and we are.
- gpm 8y agoAnd that's how you make a browser which gets no users. The no users part means it gets no funding. The no users part means it gets no influence over how websites work. The no influence over how websites work part means nothing renders properly in it - which loops back to 1. The no funding part means you can't have a team of developers working full time to make it. The not having a team of developers working full time to make it means it doesn't exist in any form that resembles a modern browser - which loops back to 1. It's like a vicious feedback cycle but the feedback isn't even necessary to make the idea a non starter. You might be interested in gopher though, at least with the lobste.rs community it's been having a small resurgence, just don't expect it to catch on with the general public.
- roca 8y agoIt's not worth putting effort into creating a browser that a negligible number of people will ever use.
- dredmorbius 8y agohttps://getpocket.com https://getpocket.com
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoGIFs would be horribly bandwidth inefficient way of doing silent video. Also, the lack of much flow control means it has very limited applications.
- roca 8y agoSites are happy to do horribly inefficient things if that's what it takes to get video ads in front of users.
- Buttons840 8y agoHow about a cap on CPU time each tab gets per click / page load?
- swiley 8y agoThis should happen for anything that isn’t explicitly an application. Documents don’t need crazy amounts of JavaScript, most of it is just glue.
- tomjen3 8y agoIsn't most things an application these days? Reddit, twitter, facebook, etc all have some form of formatting for comments, which in and of itself has to use javascript.
- swiley 8y agoThose really aren’t what I would call applications. They’re more like documents that groups of people can append to. And none of them need JavaScript for anything more than glue either. (Facebook actually has a no js version)
- finnthehuman 8y agoWebapps shouldn't get a pass for being poorly written messes. Only a handful of applications have a good reason to be CPU-intensive.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoYou just configure your browser to disable autoplay. Provided you use a browser that isn't gimped in favor of advertisers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- stephenr 8y agoSafari defaults to stopping auto play with sound but has an option to prevent any autoplay. If a site is going to go so far as to force video to play using those methods I’m going to close the tab pretty fucking quickly.